Re:ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Pr...
by jolmg on Saturday April 26, 2025 @03:05PM
(#43806234)
> It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time. Instead we defaulted to "anyone born in a US hospital is a citizen"
No, citizenship based solely on a person's birth within the territory is a common feature found in countries in the Americas:
It's always been like that. Otherwise, think of the first generation of citizens for each of these countries as they gained independence. They were citizens because they were born on that soil.
As to why this isn't the case for countries outside of the Americas, that's a more interesting question, IMO. Were people citizens in some informal sense before laws were written on the concept of a birthright to citizenship? Who knows...
No, citizenship based solely on a person's birth within the territory is a common feature found in countries in the Americas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
It's always been like that. Otherwise, think of the first generation of citizens for each of these countries as they gained independence. They were citizens because they were born on that soil.
As to why this isn't the case for countries outside of the Americas, that's a more interesting question, IMO. Were people citizens in some informal sense before laws were written on the concept of a birthright to citizenship? Who knows...